Addressing subjects as wide-ranging as angelology, the court masque, pop art, caricature, the cult of the ruin, hip-hop, Spenser's Irish policy, and the aesthetics of silence, Brian McHale pulls varied threads together to identify a repertoire of postmodernist elements characteristic of the long poems he examines.

As critic Jed Rasula explains, "McHale is wonderfully resourceful in changing the subject from chapter to chapter to fit the poems discussed, and while his approach adheres to the conventions of textual exegesis, the chapters really shine as orchestrations of issues. For...

A NEW RETROSPECTIVE OF ONE OF AMERICA'S MOST INNOVATIVE POETS

All the Whiskey in Heaven brings together Charles Bernstein's best work from the past thirty years, an astonishing assortment of different types of poems. Yet despite the distinctive differences from poem to poem, Bernstein's characteristic explorations of how language both limits and liberates thought are present throughout. Modulating the comic and the dark structural invention with buoyant soundplay, these challenging works give way to poems of lyric excess and striking emotional range....

Charles Bernstein is our postmodern jester of American poesy, equal part surveyor of democratic vistas and scholar of avant-garde sensibilities. In a career spanning thirty-five years and forty books, he has challenged and provoked us with writing that is decidedly unafraid of the tensions between ordinary and poetic language, and between everyday life and its adversaries. "Attack of the Difficult Poems," his latest collection of essays, gathers some of his most memorably irreverent work while addressing seriously and comprehensively the state of contemporary humanities, the teaching of...